Xenonauts, a Cold War-era spiritual successor to the XCOM games, has released a Kickstarter for a sequel. The sequel sought £50,000 for their game, and they’ve already surpassed their goal in only 8.5 hours.
Releasing in 2014, the original Xenonauts was a highly acclaimed game that had players fend off an alien invasion. The original game was also a Kickstarter success story when it received its funding in 2012. Originally designed as a reimagining of the original X-COM games, Xenonauts threw itself into the details when XCOM: Enemy Unknown recreated the original franchise’s systems in broad strokes.
Chris England, the head of Goldhawk Interactive, posted an update thanking donors:
I had genuine concerns this morning about how well this campaign was going to go. The games market has become far more crowded since we started developing the first Xenonauts, and Kickstarter is hardly the fresh new way of funding games that it was when we last ran a campaign back in 2012. We wondered whether people would still be interested in Xenonauts-2, especially now it’s four whole years since the original game came out…
We’re so pleased to see that we didn’t have to worry about that. The support you’ve all given us has been humbling – it really means a huge amount to us to see so many people backing us on trust, particularly those who were happy customers from our first Kickstarter / Early Access period!
One of the primary changes planned for Xenonauts 2 is an overhaul on the UI, as explained in the FAQ, which also details information on custom soldiers and rewards:
The problem is that UI art is *very* time-consuming and expensive, and you end up throwing a lot of work away if you change the mechanics after you’ve styled up a UI screen.
Because so much of our game is UI (think how many screens there are on the strategy layer!), we decided that it would be more efficient to re-use some of the art from the original Xenonauts while we were experimenting with the gameplay and we would do the final UI styling towards the end of development.
We’re actually working with a cool UI artist right now to set a final “style” for the game, and we’ll likely be implementing this new UI before and during the closed beta. This is the point at which we’ll properly address a bunch of the UI issues from the first Xenonauts, too – for example tiny fonts, or bad support for ultra-widescreen resolutions etc.
You can view and support the Xenonauts 2 Kickstarter here. There is also a demo available that shows off some of the combat.